Graduate Student Lauren McNamara wins 2024 Merck Research Award
University of Chicago Department of Chemistry graduate student Lauren McNamara has won the 2024 Merck Research Award, sponsored by Merck and the American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee (WCC). The award is meant to highlight the burgeoning research of “individuals in their third and fourth year of graduate school with a research focus in Organic, Inorganic, Medicinal, Analytical, Chemical Biology, Computational or Structural Chemistry.”
McNamara, who works as part of the John Anderson Lab, will be recognized at the WCC luncheon during ACS Fall 2024 in Denver. Additionally, she will present her research, recently featured in publications in Chem and JACS, in a symposium on Aug. 18.
We recently spoke with McNamara to get her thoughts about the honor:
How does it feel to be selected for this award?
I'm honored to be among this cohort of talented women chemists! I think it's an incredible opportunity to listen to the fascinating research the other awardees are conducting and to meet the brilliant women in the ACS WCC and at Merck that are sponsoring this award.
Can you share a little bit about the research you'll be presenting?
I'll primarily be discussing some work that just came out last month in JACS, along with a few recent results. The work centers on my recent development of a series of new near-infrared emitting dyes, the properties of which can be tuned through simple capping ligand swaps. This is an exciting area for us, as the study not only allowed us to learn more about how to tune our system, but we also were able to optimize our dyes for various applications, ranging from bioimaging to lasing to near-infrared barcoding.
What does the award say to you about the work you are currently doing?
It's exciting to see this work recognized, as it was a completely new area for us that I started when I first joined the lab in 2020. I'm fortunate my advisor John trusted me enough to really dive deep into the photophysics and magnetic properties of this new system without much precedent or similar work being done in the lab. It's been a really rich research area for me to explore over the past four years, and I'm incredibly thankful to have been able to work on it.
The WCC was established in 1927 to serve as a forum for women in chemistry and related professions; develop recommendations regarding issues of interest to women chemists; provide a means of increasing and improving participation of women in the chemical sciences and the Society; promote the recognition of women chemists; and inform the Council and other appropriate Society bodies of the Committee’s activities.